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THE 



Growth of Lafayette 



A POST-PRANDIAL ADDRESS 



Prof. Francis A. March, llu., h.d. 



THE 

Growth of Lafayette 

A POST-PRANDIAL ADDRESS 

BY 

Francis A. March, LL.D., L.H.D., 

Professor of the English Language and. Comparative Philology 
in Lafayette College. 



Delivered at the Annual Meeting and Banquet of the 
Philadelphia Alumni Association 
Lafayette College, ^ 
March 1, 1888. ^ 



published by the 

Philadelphia Alumni Association 

OF Lafayette College. 



iij: 



36998 



Copyright 1888 by 

Philadelphia Alumni Association 

Of Lafayette College 



^ ADDRESS 



THE GROWTH OF LAFAYETTE." 



./H 



Francis A. March, LL.D., L.H.D., 

R OF THE English Language and Comparative Philology 
IN Lafayette College. 



! are no dreams of youth which every college student 
rtain to dream than visions of the growth and great- 
i alma mater. And there are no college graduates 

more reason to cherish these dreams than the old 

Lafayette, 
that shall be the subject of my talk to-night, " the 

Lafayette," or, to put it in more imposing form and 
test fashionable phrase, — " the development of a 
)llege." 
jafayette boys do not believe in developments and 

that develop or evolve themselves — that go it blind, 
in intelligence to start with. A wise and good power 
d for the development of the world ; for the develop- 
, college, a wise and good heart and head ; for the 
3nt of Lafayette, Dr. Cattell. 

3 in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred 
-three that the Reverend William Cassiday Cattell 



4 THE GROWTH OF LAFAYETTE 

became president of Lafayette. His face was bright with a 
thousand hopes, but the most significant effluence of the new 
power was the waking of the whole college to new religious 
life, — God's blessing breathed upon old Lafayette, — Christ's 
stamp, to boot, upon the new president. 

Troops of friends gathered round him, Mr. Pardee and 
Mr. Adamson in the van. No other college has, or ever has 
had, such a Board of Trustees. Students thronged in. The 
college developed. 

In the first place, the courses of study were multiplied 
and differentiated. 

The old college curriculum was intended for students who 
were expecting to be ministers, lawyers or doctors. Work 
enough for four years before coming of age had been agreed 
upon by educators as the best preparation for professional 
study. Some of it is of practical use to professional men. 
The mathematics are needed by the lawyer to sum up his 
bills of costs, and by the preacher to see how he can make his 
salary go round, after he has paid his life insurance, and his 
interest at the bank, and his share of the million of dollars 
endowment of his church. The languages are necessary tools 
in original research. Doctors use the natural sciences. Others 
of the studies are good for mental discipline. All had come 
to be conventional accomplishments without which no one 
could pass current among scholars. 

Lafayette was strongest in the studies for ministers. It 
had been established for pious students who could not encounter 
the costs and the temptations of the great cities and colleges. 
The first president. Dr. George Junkin, was a great man, a man 
of genius. He attracted other men of genius. Has any other 



THE GROWTH OF LAFAYETTE 5 

college without endowment ever had among the professors 
associated with its first president such a roll of eminences as 
Samuel D. Gross, James M. Porter, Traill Green, Charles F. 
McCay, Washington .McCartney, James C. MofFatt, William 
Henry Green, James H. Coffin, Isidor Loewenthal? 

This type of teacher had been propagated. The college 
never had been common place. But in the period preceding 
1863 half of the graduates studied for the ministry. 

A new class of students now presented themselves, 
students intending to be miners, civil engineers, mechanics, 
chemists. Here are new learned professions. They grow 
rapidly in importance and dignity, and their most eminent 
members are more and more earnestly advising aspiring young 
men to take a course of liberal learning in addition to the 
courses of a professional school. New courses have been 
arranged at Lafayette to meet the wants of these new professions. 
They contain modern languages, especially English, natural 
sciences, technical studies, political economy, and history, — the 
keys and tools of modern man. This is our development by 
multiplication. It gives rise to a four-fold multiplication of 
courses to meet the demands of four kinds of learned pro- 
fessions. 

A later duplication of this kind is just now demanded, 
mainly by teachers and scientists who have already graduated, 
but who seek for eminent positions, professorships in colleges 
or the like, and find it of use to take post-graduate courses for 
the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. These students now 
number nearly as many as our senior undergraduates. 

Many of our sister colleges have developed courses for 
women. I do not know that any woman has ever made appli- 



6 THE GROWTH OF LAFAYETTE 

cation for admission to the undergraduate courses of Lafayette. 
I have often wondered why. We have hosts of bright girls in 
Easton and thereabouts who carry off the honors in our high 
schools, and who afterwards combine into Chatauqua circles 
and literature classes. It may be they are afraid of Dr. Knox, 
now ; but they could not have been afraid of Dr. Cattell. 

Differentiation, to use a technicality of the evolutionists, 
gives rise to elective studies. When there are plenty of 
professors such studies are natural. There are often several 
different authors equally suited to the capacity of a class, but 
one having one kind of interest, another another kind. If there 
are half a dozen teachers of Greek, it is a pleasant arrange- 
ment that each give a course in a different author. Then a 
student who is thinking of studying law and likes legal 
oratory, can go into Demosthenes, a preacher of the same 
college class into Chrysostom, a doctor into Aristotle, a literary 
man into JEschylus, if he is for tragedy, or Aristophanes, if for 
fun ; or at certain grades a choice may be given between different 
kinds of study of similar difficulty, as between organic analysis 
and analytical geometry, between Blackstone and bridge build- 
ing, or Hebrew and Homer, or Beowulf and Goethe. 

In these ways the old Lafayette course of 2070 recitations 
and lectures has developed into 9263. 

The electives at the other old colleges, at Harvard even, 
are for the most part like those at Lafayette, developments of 
the old college course. Innocent persons think from the news- 
paper talk, that they can go to Harvard and do what they 
please ; walk into the laboratories and handle all the gases and 
blow up the buildings the first day, or into Professor Goodwin's 
Greek and Professor Child's Beowulf at their pleasure. But 



THE GROWTH OF LAFAYETTE 7 

they would find that in order to take this study they must first 
have taken that ; and before that, the other. There is a pro- 
gressive system and they must begin at the beginning. It is a 
development of the old four-years course. 

There is, I am told, a development of the old field school 
in some of our newer American universities. They undertake 
to get together a body of permanent instructors in every thing, 
to whom anybody can go, and hear somebody lecture on 
anything he pleases. 

I dare say the friends of Lafayette would not very strenu- 
ously object to the establishment of well-endowed professorships 
there of minute or remote branches of learning, of thorough 
bass, for example, or Japanese; but a distinction should be 
made between a college and a university proper. The college 
work is the education of youth. Provision for professorial 
assistance to men in the labors of their middle life must be 
mainly relegated to government universities. A Bureau of 
references to heads of workshops of the right sort might be 
better even there than a permanent salaried body of professors 
in waiting. 

The attempt to provide a great number of elective studies 
for college youth, not as parts of useful courses, but to please 
the fancy of the idle, or kindle the fires of incipient genius has 
not been necessary at Lafayette. The great mass of our youth 
are still pressing on hard to active life. Ninety-nine in the 
hundred are in haste to begin the work of some profession, and 
go to college to be fitted for it. This determines what is best 
for them to study. Our engineers do not gambol about in 
protoplasm or Sanskrit. Our chemists do not spend their days 
and nights in Hebrew or quaternions. Shall our ministers 



8 THE GROWTH OF LAFAYETTE 

that-are-to-be study Latin and Greek ? That is not an open 
question for them. They must study them. They cannot get 
a license to preach without them. So must our lawyers study 
Latin or they cannot gain admittance to the bar. 

There are, to be sure, a few persons now in our country 
who do not intend to practice any profession, or mingle with 
professional men, who mean to lead a life of luxury and 
pleasure, who abhor Latin, Greek and mathematics, but who 
fancy certain semi-intellectual occupations, some descriptive 
science perhaps, Shakespeare and the musical glasses, or ath- 
letics, and so prefer to hang about a college during their 
minority. 

I very seriously recognize that it is most desirable that 
youth of this class should have the best influences of college 
life. Perhaps it is desirable that some modification of college 
rigor should be made for them. But that is rather for a 
university to make. Their numbers are small. I believe 
Harvard alone might provide for all this class of matriculates, 
and that there is no call whatever for the old colleges to 
attempt this sort of equipment, except the call which fashion 
makes. 

With the development of our courses of study there was a 
corresponding development of our diploma. The student of 
law or medicine or theology wants a diploma to secure him his 
registration which shows that he has studied Latin and Greek. 
So does the teacher who applies for a class in classics in the 
High School. The teacher of science, on the other hand, wants 
a diploma which shows that he has studied the sciences; the 
engineer one that shows he has studied engineering. Harvard, 
which boasts its many courses, still gives but a single degree. 



THE GROWTH OF LAFAYETTE 9 

That seems to be a case of arrested development. The Harvard 
graduate who wishes to enter as a law student in our courts, or 
to enter the graduate courses at Lafayette has to bring a set of 
papers supplementary to his diploma, or try to pass the 
Lafayette examinations. To be sure, if a graduate is going to 
do nothing in particular, it may suit him to pose with a degree 
that declares him to be nothing in particular. 

At the same time with this development of the courses of 
study there has been a development of the methods of teaching. 
The early college had little apparatus of illustration or manipu- 
lation, and its work was mostly a gymnastic of the intellect. 

The traditional picture of the student represents him in 
dressing gown and slippers, recumbent, his book fastened open 
before him, and needing nothing to help him study but the 
hydraulic pressure on the brain which he gets from his legs 
high propt on chair or table, desk or mantel. 

But all study now is accompanied by exercises of practice 
or research. Munificent friends of learning and Lafayette have 
bestowed their hundreds of thousands of dollars in buildings 
and equipment for it. Our student of to-day would be best 
caricatured blowing himself up in the chemical laboratory, or 
caught in the wheels of machines, or making furtive sketches 
in the drawing-rooms, or upsetting a theodolite, or lugging arm- 
loads of books of reference. 

All the best colleges use these methods in the study of 
the material sciences. A similar principle has been freely used 
at Lafayette in the linguistic and philosophic and historical 
studies. In these it has been common in our universities to 
give up the old text book study for lectures by the home 
professors. It is thought best to have every morsel of truth 



10 THE GROWTH OF LAFAYETTE 

lubricated well with professorial palaver. At Lafayette study 
of a good elementary text book has been retained, and incul- 
cated ; but it has been accompanied by continual exercises of 
original research. The students are made to write their own 
lectures, we say. 

Suitable specific topics for research suggested by the text 
book are given out every week and every student is required 
to hand in every week a written discourse embodying the 
results of his research for the week. A number of these papers 
are read in class and the whole topic is handled in a general 
discussion. 

This is a capital college training of American growth 
similar in principle to the German /S'emmarmm work, which is 
just now being introduced into our most advanced universities. 

In connection with it a handling of our libraries has 
grown up which is perhaps worth mentioning. The works of 
general reference, cyclopaedias, dictionaries and the like, and 
also the works of special reference upon each of these topics of 
research are collected and left in open cases for free use by all 
the students in the Reading-room, and to be taken out at night 
by such students as are making researches in them. The actual 
use of these books is ten times what it would be if each book 
had to be drawn from the librarians. They are often in con- 
ditions to shock our model librarians, volumes out of place, 
bottom up, battered and all that, and worn out, many of them, 
every year. But wdiat are books made for, Mr. Librarian? 
The main reading of the college is of these books, and of the 
periodical literature which is kept under the same regulations. 

Novel reading has not much developed, Scott's novc^ls are 
read more than all the rest together. And Miss Austen's 



THE GROWTH OF LAFAYETTE 11 

Pride and Prejudice keeps from year to year in front of all 
books but reference books. 

Our athletics must also be counted in our development. 
A professor of Physical Culture was elected in 1865, one 
of Dr. Cattell's earliest professors, as the new gymnasium 
was one of his latest endowments. Regular exercises in class 
are required of all the students, the same as in literary and 
scientific studies, and athletics are a most important addition 
to the old college training. 

Whether it is due to the bracing air of Easton, or Pres- 
byterian back-bone, our college teams take the lead among 
those of undergraduate collegians. And w^e have little of the 
unfortunate effects most deplored in our largest universities. 
None of our students give themselves up to athletics ; we 
cannot get our champions to practice enough. Nor do we have 
professional trainers. Foot ball was rather unsatisfactory two 
or three years ago. Our big brothers took to disabling the 
players rather than carrying the ball to the goal, and told us that 
it was the first principle of foot ball to throw away all thought of 
being gentlemanlike ; and the city mobs began to jeer at games 
in which bloody noses and cracked crowns were not current. But 
the new rules with two good referees have changed all that, and 
we have never had better exhibitions of manly strength, endur- 
ance, and skill, and of knightly spirit upon our campus than 
the last year's games with Haverford, Swarthmore and Lehigh. 

With all these added cultures of mind and body there has 
been a notable mellowing of social habits. There are hand- 
somer rooms, more costly board. The college fraternities have 
grown in strength, and with their old memories and far-reaching 
associations are able to develop a more genial manhood. 



12 THE GROWTH OF LAFAYETTE 

I am not sure but we make college too good a place. 
Two persons may pass through the very same series of circum- 
stances, and one find it all happiness and the other all misery. 
One begins a millionaire and keeps losing and losing till he 
reaches poverty. The other begins with poverty and works up 
to his million rejoicing all the way. An early life of hardness, 
a setting yourself at zero in youth has its advantages. I fear 
sometimes that our preachers may find their college life with 
its morning naps for beauty sleep, its studies as they please, 
its daily use of costly athletic equipments, its baths, its banquets, 
its music, its friendships, its spacious halls full of light and 
tempered air, an untimely life as a prelude to a struggle with 
sin and bad air, poverty, deacons and church choirs. 

At Lafayette we are pretty nearly right ; w^e are still for 
plain living and high thinking. AVhen it comes to students 
having thousand-dollar rooms, and body servants, and horses, 
real horses to ride to recitation, and dogs, and canes all round, 
that is going too far. 

An eminent professor of one of our greatest western 
universities, .returning from a visit to a private mansion on 
the grounds of another university, described it to me as a 
palace of stone carved in figures and full inside of statuary, 
paintings, and what not. And he exploded with indignation 
that such an ideal of private life should be set before the un- 
sophisticated American youth of the university. I was sur- 
prised at first by his heat ; but I plainly see that the professors' 
houses at Lafayette are far better suited to their salaries. 
When we have a professor who is disposed to spend a million in 
building, and has the million, I most sincerely hope that he will 
put it in a public building like that of Mr. Pardee. I should 



THE GROWTH OF LAFAYETTE 13 

be sorry to know that any of our students' rooms were so 
splendidly upholstered and garnished, that strangers were 
taken to them as a more imposing sight than- our public build- 
ings. It is very undesirable that the habits of social life at a 
college should be so expensive that a professor cannot live on 
his salary. That makes it necessary to seek oftenest for pro- 
fessors^ either rich men s sons, or husbands of rich men's 
daughters, or elderly gentlemen who have accumulated wealth. 
These are very desirable ornaments of any institution, but 
better suit, I think, the great American universities than hard 
working colleges like Lafayette. 

We see that all these developments of college studies, 
college manual training, athletics, social life, are in the direc- 
tion of freedom, of more powerful personality, a richer indi- 
vidual character, a higher life. 

The central source from which these movements flow is 
religion, more of that divine life which is the life of that vine 
into whom the true man is grafted. Lafayette was founded 
in prayer, and has been kept alive in prayer. It always has 
been a religious college. But there has been of late years an 
immense increase of religious life. It does not resemble at 
all the revivals of fifty years ago. It is not a revival of 
revivals, but a revival of religion. There is little of the old 
law work. Confession of sin gives place to profession of faith 
and love. Our youths seem easily to attain a consciousness of 
the divine life in them, and this not for enjoyment as with the 
mystics, but for action. They make a business of religion. 
They organize, equip themselves for service, and go out working 
in every direction. They are ready to go to the ends of the 
earth. 



14 THE GROWTH OF LAFAYETTE 

These feelings are common to all the old religious colleges, 
and yet we find a falling off in the number of college prayers, 
and other religious services of the whole institution. 

"Dr. Luther," said his wife, "why is it that we pray less 
frequently now than we used to under the Pope ? " 

If I knew Luther's answer, perhaps I could explain the 
decline in college prayers. 

No doubt many of our earnest Sauls, who are to be Pauls, 
are aware that their own prayers are more eloquent than those 
of the college authorities. But in some quarters loud objection 
is made to compulsory religion. 

Compulsory attendance on prayers and preaching is a 
special object of attack. But it is almost a misnomer to call 
the college discipline compulsion. It is nothing like so strong 
as the obligations of professional life, or the tyranny of fashion, 
or social habits, or home influence. A college student is about 
the freest man there is. The compulsion to prayers, what is it? 
If a student is absent twenty times without excuse, word is sent to 
his father. But if he were at home and absent from home prayers 
his father would know it the first morning. When Adonis visits 
at the home of Edith, does the sweet compulsion to family 
prayers make the gracious words of the Bible less dear to him ? 

Much of the talk against college prayers is a survival from 
old times when they really had painful accompaniments. We 
used to get up at Amherst in winter while it was black night, 
struggle through the snow waist deep sometimes, and hear 
prayers in a chapel without fire with the thermometer twent}^ 
degrees below zero, more or less, and then have a Greek recita- 
tion by the light of little oil lamps, before we went to breakfast, 
before sun rise. 



THE GROWTH OF LAFAYETTE 15 

At Lafayette it used to be the custom to hold these early 
prayers without any following recitation, so that the students 
who had tumbled up and taken prayers, for the most part 
tumbled into bed again. 

But we have changed all that. It is certainly a pleasant 
sight to see our college now, bathed and breakfasted and ready 
for recitations, gathering at morning prayers. Our beautiful 
hill bright in the early sun, the valley lying in rosy mist with 
the rivers glinting through, the quiet mountains looking on as 
though they liked the looks, the white smokes curling upward 
from hearths of homes that may be temples, the spired fingers 
of the churches pointing heavenward, the college campus with 
its hundred paths all leading to the college chapel, the hundreds 
of young men rejoicing in their strength, and rejoicing in the 
morning and m the nature around them which is in itself a 
liberal education, and gathering to offer a morning tribute of 
thanks and praise to the giver of all good, and ask him for 
stout hearts and clear heads for the labors of the day, and for 
the scholar's blessing, the pure heart that shall see God, — is a 
sight worth seeing. It is impossible to believe that it can be 
a burden to any. 

I have seen many generations of college students grow up 
and pass through life. I have known hundreds of them well, 
and I am fully satisfied that the habit of attendance on 
religious exercises in college has been a most powerful influence 
for good. 

I believe in it still. I trust it still. When I meet a 
Lafayette man, whether in the pulpit, or at the bar, a doctor, 
a teacher, a journalist, an engineer, I hope to find him a leader 
among men, I hope to find that he wears still some grace won 



16 THE GROWTH OF LAFAYETTE 

from the humanities, the fair humanities of Greece and Rome 
and the golden days of Queen Elizabeth. But I expect, I trust, 
that I shall find him to be a better man for going regularly to 
prayers and church. 

And that, after all, is the proper work of a college, to make 
Christian men of sound culture. It is not so much to develop 
genius ; genius in the teens is either omniverous or stupid, and 
either way considers professors a bore ; nor is it to make incipient 
professors write up huge note books of statistics and bibli- 
ography. It is to prepare our youth to discharge the duties of 
good citizens in those professions requiring special preparation, 
to make good preachers, lawyers, doctors, chemists, teachers, 
journalists, engineers, farmers, merchants, master workmen in 
every good w^ork, heads of every good organization in Church 
and State. 

In this great career so auspiciously begun by Dr. Junkin 
and carried forward by Dr. Cattell, all friends of Christian 
education may rejoice with us that under Dr. Knox, clear 
sighted, upright and downright, and devout, and true hearted, 
Lafayette still marches on. 



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